An alt-right nutjob plotted to kill my friend

This is a shame, but it’s part of a broader pattern. With the alt-right’s recent harassment of Trump Republicans such as Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr., the focus has been on the hateful ideologies these people hold, not on the violence they foment. And it is, of course, a good thing that most mainstream conservatives have condemned the alt-right’s odious views.

As my Washington Examiner colleague Madeline Fry noted, “The alt-right is not the future of the Right, but to make sure of it, we must push its hateful ideologies back in the dark corner where they belong.”

She was talking about crazy alt-right figureheads such as Nicholas Fuentes. There are still conservatives out there willing to defend Fuentes and his ilk, despite his active and unabashed participation in spreading Holocaust denial (he even compared murdered Jews to cookies baked in an oven), anti-Semitism, and racism.

But, we must do more than just push back on these hateful ideas. Because these people aren’t just hateful and crazy — they’re dangerous.

I’ve seen this first-hand. My close friend Kassy Dillon, a prominent conservative journalist and blogger, was targeted by one of these violent alt-right extremists as a part of his larger campaign against conservative Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro and his media outlet The Daily Wire, where Dillon used to work.

The man, Chase Bliss Colasurdo, was arrested by the FBI after he attempted to purchase a gun while stockpiling ammo and body armor and making explicit threats against Dillon’s life in social media posts. He threatened Shapiro as well.

“In one post, he wrote it was time to start ‘bombing synagogues,’” the Department of Justice relates. “Throughout April 2019, [Colasurdo] sent threatening email messages and online posts to media figures in Southern California using anti-Semitic slurs and threats to kill.” The government believed Colasurdo was actively taking steps toward carrying out his threats.

Understandably, Dillon was terrified by all of this. She told me:

This isn’t about one crazy person, who police admit has serious mental health issues. It’s the alt-right movement more broadly: Fuentes, neo-Nazi blogger Scott Greer, and their kind might not (explicitly) seek to hurt anyone themselves or instruct people to do so (although Fuentes does wave around a knife when people mention Jews during his live streams), but they know their followers are dangerous. After all, Fuentes was at the Charlottesville rally and saw how that unfolded.

They know, they just don’t care, and nonetheless, they egg them on and sic them on establishment conservative figures, including journalists here at the Washington Examiner.

Dillon’s case shows how perilous the results can be.

This is why it’s so disturbing to see figures nearer to the conservative mainstream make excuses for Fuentes and other alt-right figures. Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, for instance, criticized Ben Shapiro for attacking Fuentes, calling the neo-Nazi a “New Right” leader. Some editors at the religious journal First Things have attempted to dismiss conservative writers for criticizing the alt-right. In light of the increasingly violent, radical behavior of alt-right figureheads, this equivocation is shameful and irresponsible.

So too, it’s sickening to see the liberal media either blackout or woefully miscover these developments. Imagine, for a moment, that the alt-right had threatened and tried to kill a liberal journalist. It would have been national news, and rightfully so. But our mainstream liberal media “firefighters” (cough: CNN’s Brian Stelter) don’t seem so concerned with alt-right threats to the press when they target conservatives.

It’s a damn shame. Americans of all political stripes need to call out the alt-right for its hatred, but we must also be on guard for the violent threat these radicals pose to our society.